Roman Sterlingov was recently convicted of operating the Bitcoin mixer Bitcoin Fog. The case is worrying on a few levels. Firstly based on the article, the amount of data needed to prove guilt looks to be very thin indeed. Essentially just a few records in a database. Seems to me that could very easily be manufactured. But on a larger level, in my opinion the whole notion of financial privacy, and how it relates to individual freedoms, is going to become increasingly important.
The more I think about this, the more it seems to me that without some privacy when it comes to financial transactions, people can never be free. They will always get exploited by entities that seek to opress them, monitoring their transactions and activities to determine their minimum viable capital requirements for survival. That can then be used to oppress them. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Same goes for individuals all the way up to nation states.
As many of us have discovered over the past decade or so, access to money has long been a tool to oppress people. It happens on a truely massive scale via organisations like the IMF and World Bank, that proport to help developing nations while actually saddling them with enormous debt that they can never pay back.
But it happens on a small scale too. It’s the sort of thing that you don’t realise how scary it is until it has happened to you. Here in Vietnam it’s been happening to me on a daily basis now for several years in one way or another. And that’s with cash. Once things are digital this sort of oppression could be deployed at scale and used in combination with powerful AI to target individuals in a fully automated way.
It’s such an important thing because, in our modern societies, financial transactions are the basis of pretty much everything we do as humans. Of course the tricky thing is that financial privacy would be for both non-criminals and criminals alike. It also seems to me that given how prone to corruption institutions are over the long term, that criminals would eventually manouver themselves into positions where they could use transaction data to target non-criminals. The regulations put in place would be repurposed and used against the very people they aim to protect.
It’s likely that the criminals, at least the smart ones, will actually want anti privacy regulations. Much in the same way that large tech companies want regulation, because once you are an established entity, regulations make it more difficult for startups, and indeed individuals, to succeed and retain their freedom.
Ultimately I think it might boil down pretty close to an all or nothing situation. Either we all have freedom, or none of us have freedom, because with pervasive AI, even the criminals would eventually end up oppressing themselves.
What’s the value of individual freedom? #